My Husband's Sweethearts Read Free Page A

you one of those high-powered female
professionals they talk about these days?"
    Who's they? I wonder. I lean toward her, conspiratorially.
"I'm not a high-powered male professional," I admit.
    She takes this as comedic. She rears and laughs up into
the air nozzles overhead. She settles quickly though and
asks her next question. "You're probably part of one of
those high-powered couples with a baby that's learning
Mozart. I've heard of those genius babies from high-powered
couples. Am I right?" Her question has the air of
someone on a game show.
    "Sorry," I say. "I don't have a baby. No kids—genius or
otherwise." This is an old wound. Artie and I had started
talking about a family. We'd started reimagining the bedrooms
to include a nursery. We'd taken up the habit of
interrupting our own conversations to say, "Wait, that
would be a good kid name." The names were always
ridiculous—Ravenous, Cotillion, why Nathaniel and not
Neanderthal? In the wake of the popular trend of place
names for kids (London, Paris, Montana), we were compiling
a list of our own: Düsseldorf, Antwerp, Hackensack.
Artie had just sold off another chunk of stock in the Italian
restaurant chain and had hired a young, tough, soon-to-be
mogul type to take some of the pressure off. Our lives were
calming down, and we'd started trying to have kids. I hated
the term trying —as if we were two bodies flailing aimlessly
at each other. It implies sexual incompetence and that was
never one of Artie's problems. And then just two months
later, I intercepted an e-mail from a woman with the screen
name "Springbird." (Springbird! It didn't seem right to be
duped by a woman self-named Springbird!) I'd come
across good old Springbird when I was looking for Artie's
travel info and mistook her for his agent. The e-mail asked
if Artie's back was okay from "sleeping on that lumpy futon"
and said that this woman "loved him" and "missed
him achingly."
    Achingly.
    Then I went to Artie's partner's secretary. His own secretary
is an austere, tight-lipped woman who'd never tell a
thing. But his partner's secretary, Miranda, is a legendary
gossip. I took her to lunch at her favorite place, the All U
Can Eat King Chinese Food buffet, pretending to seek
her advice, pretending to know a lot more than I did. She
spilled the news over sweet-and-sour chicken and fried
dumplings that Artie had someone on the side. She'd seen
an e-mail or two herself and corroborated the name
Springbird, but didn't have much beyond that. My fortune
cookie read "You will visit the Nile." What's that
supposed to mean? Was that supposed to be a metaphor?
    When I got home, I confronted Artie while he was
taking a shower. He stepped out and told me the truth,
the whole truth, not just about the woman Miranda had
mentioned, but he confessed to the two other flings— dalliances. He said he'd tell me anything I wanted to know.
Full disclosure. He said, "I'll do anything to make this
right." But I didn't want to know any details. He sat on
the edge of our bed, a towel around his waist, shampoo
still in his hair. At this very moment, sitting next to this
woman in business class, staring at the upright tray table
in front of me, I despise Artie as much as I did then. I despise
him for what? Not so much the infidelity—this
sometimes overwhelms me—but I despise him for his
carelessness. How could he have been so careless with our
marriage, with me?
    "Well, now," the quitter muses aloud, " high-powered
isn't right. Not exactly. That's more like what they call
newfangled cell phones. What do they call them? Power
couples? Is that right? What does your husband do?"
    Finally the flight attendant is walking down the aisle,
my drink in hand. She smiles. She bends down and hands
it to me.
    "What does my husband do?" I repeat the question.
"Well, flight attendants are always a big favorite."
    The older woman says, "Oh . . . well . . . that's not
what I